April 4-6, 2012: The PCGS Members Only Show in Las Vegas, NV
No question about it – traveling from New England to Las Vegas and back over just a few days requires several things:
- A mega-commitment to do everything we can to find new cool coins for the site.
- The chutzpah to call PCGS President Don Willis at the last minute and ask for a table.
- A willingness to sit in tiny airline seats on several different planes for like 10 hours.
- A mini-leap of faith that attending the show for a short time will be worthwhile.
And, now that I am back, I am pleased to report that (as usual) Don came through for us, we did set up (as opposed to just walking the floor, which was our original plan) and the event turned out to be what numismatists call a “hoot”, with good success on the buying side, a massive haul of grading and even some pretty good sales which were sort of unexpected and thus would have been placed by me in the BONUS column of our Show Recap and Analysis spreadsheet if there was a such a thing, which there is not.
Included in our haul: yet another deluxe high-end colonial piece to be revealed shortly, some choice US type and more ghoulish pieces with people hanging on them.
And even though this event was a mere month after the last PCGS Vegas Invitational, and, as a result, a number of the regular dealers were not in attendance, it was pretty busy overall, with a lot of buying, selling, wheeling and dealing in a generally upbeat environment.
It was not all serious business though, as at one point a dealer commandeered another’s motorized scooter and began doing laps around the room, occasionally bumping into a chair or a table, reaching speeds that I would estimate at just less than 30 miles an hour (which while impressive, is still a bit slower than the Segway driving security guard at LAX described in our September 2009 RR). Predictably, these shenanigans ended with the dealer that owned the scooter smashing into the Heritage table and coming very close to knocking it over.
Which fortunately did not impact our grading results on the other side of the room, which were, overall, just fine – which is usually the case for us, since unlike some others we know, we don’t really obsess about the grades on the slabs. We prefer to focus on beautiful coins.
Like the box of magnificent toned pieces a serious collector showed me on Thursday. Alas, they were not for sale.
Plenty of other things were though, especially at our table, including a Fugio variety we sold to a dealer we did not even know collected them (despite knowing him and seeing him at nearly every show for y-e-a-r-s).
All of which combined to make this event pretty good for us, both commercially, and, especially, socially, in an environment where we were able to spend quality time with collectors and dealers that is just not possible at a typically hectic “regular” show.
Which is why Team CRO will definitely be back for the next installment of this event in mid-July.
Before then, though, we have a number of shows, starting with the Central States Numismatic Society Convention from where our next Road Report will be posted in just about 10 days from now.
So you might want to keep an eye out for that.
